The liturgy of the Word is
ad populum,
that of the Sacrifice is ad Deum.

The priest in history-
and in mystery
Part II

By Aidan Nichols

n I come now to the second part of this essay in which I propose to treat the subsequent history of the priesthood under four headings, summed up briefly enough in four representative figures. First, under the formula "the priest and the mysteries" I will look in John Chrysostom at the age of the Fathers for something about the sacramental mysteries of the priestly office. Secondly, under that of "the priest and the mind" I will find in the work of Thomas Aquinas an implicit account of Christian intelligence at play in the teaching office. Thirdly, under the heading "the priest and mysticism" I will examine the spiritual theology of Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle in the early modern period for an exploration of the personal conditions for the fruitful exercise of those offices so far considered, and lastly, under the rubric "the priest and pastoral mission" I shall see in John Vianney in the modern period an image of that pastoral office which rounds off the trio of apostolic charges. These will be, then, four small vignettes, to stimulate thought.

First, Chrysostom and the mysteries. While the great teaching Fathers of the patristic golden age who wrote on clerical life-Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine, Gregory the Great-were mostly concerned with ethical aspects of the pastoral office, the only book left us by the patristic age specifically entitled "On the Priesthood"-Chrysostom's Peri Hierosunês -is above all a text about the celebration of the Liturgy.1 Perhaps the best way to understand it is via the third of the Antiochene doctor's homilies on the Letter to the Hebrews where he calls the priests of the Church sundouloi, "fellow-servants," of the risen Christ. Fellows with whom? With the angels. For why? For man's salvation. Here we have an understanding of the ecclesial priesthood that is vital if we are to move into closer union in these matters with the Eastern Orthodox whose view it still defines. The Eucharist, as the work par excellence of the hiereus, the bishop or presbyter, represents in the most realistic sense-re-presents-the death and glorification of the Lord whereby he became fully our High Priest, uniting the human world to the heavenly world in himself. In his Hebrews commentary, Chrysostom stresses how the suffering and compassion, intercession and obedience of Christ on earth were all brought to a mighty climax in the sacrifice of the Cross.2 Christ is not a priest-an intermediary-in the order of his divine nature, as the Arians supposed, but he is High Priest in the order of grace, that is, in the order of the gratuitous salvation that God brought about in the voluntary self-abasement of the Son. When Christ, duly exalted, takes his place at the Father's right hand, his humanity becomes the complete expression of the priestly rôle the Logos took on for our sake at the Annunciation. But though in himself he is perfected, and reigns henceforth in the heavenly places in unspeakable majesty and beatitude, still he remains a priest for us. And all of this-the taking up of the world through Christ into harmony with the angels-is made present by the ministerial priest in the Eucharistic sacrifice. Inevitably, then, there is something unearthly about the priest's rôle in the Liturgy. As Chrysostom writes in On the Priesthood:

Though the office of the priesthood is exercised on earth, it ranks nevertheless in the order of celestial things-and rightly so. It was neither man nor an angel nor an archangel nor any other created power but the Paraclete himself who established this ministry, and who ordained that men abiding in the flesh should imitate the ministry of the angels. For that reason it behoves the bearer of the priesthood to be as pure as if he stood in the very heavens amidst these powers.3

"Let all mortal flesh keep silence": a text from the Greek Liturgy which has entered English Catholic hymnals speaks of the awe we should have when we celebrate. But do we have it?

In turning to the Middle Ages, and to Thomas Aquinas, for our second historical vignette, we move, where the understanding of priesthood is concerned, into no alien world. Thomas links the priesthood quite explicitly to the Eucharist first and foremost. Thomas's deep devotion to the Mass frequently brought him to a halt in the middle of celebrating, and on his death-bed he made a special profession of the Eucharistic presence when Viaticum was brought. Many scholars would now relate this to the vision he had whilst saying Mass at Naples and which led him to tell Br. Reginald that all he had written was "as straw"-meaning not that he had realized the intellectual life was evangelically worthless but that while his writings might be worth having they could be no more than a start. The image of straw was common in the period for the literal sense of Scripture; it would be totally unlike Thomas to dismiss altogether the value of words, since for him right words lead to reality.4

Pope John XXII canonized Thomas precisely as a priest-theologian and though in his time it was the intellectual level of the episcopate which most worried the Papacy, Thomas best represents the intellectual vocation of the presbyter to whom the ministry of the Word is also entrusted for the explication of the faith to others.

If we divide his work into five segments we get an idea of what any priest should be contributing-not necessarily with Thomas's finesse!-to the life of the mind. Thomas wrote biblical commentaries-and we must be able to give a good account of Scripture. He produced resolutions of a wide range of disputed or "quodlibetal" ("ask what you like") questions-and we must know a little bit about everything relevant to the faith or how to look it up. From his pen came overall views of the faith in the two Summas-and one advantage of the old-style individual instruction of converts for the priest was that he had to work out in a rounded way what the Church believes. He penned philosophical commentaries-and we need to think a little about that because the way faith-issues are raised in the contemporary world is chiefly through general ideas. Finally, he wrote sermons-which Thomas would not have seen as totally different from theology, for there too we pass on sacra doctrina, the ecclesial understanding of divine truth, through study and meditation. A capacity to use well our spare time-apart from sheer recreation, when needed-is for a priest the same as a capacity for contemplation. That is how Thomas understood the injunction of Ecclesiasticus: "Run ahead into your house and gather yourself there, and play there and pursue your thoughts."5

Moving on in time to the early modern period, and in subject matter to the issue of "the priest and mysticism"-what I called above the personal conditions for the fruitful inhabiting of the sacerdotal and prophetic offices, I single out Pierre de Bérulle. Following the cue of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which went beyond the Tridentine canons in demanding not just competence but holiness, Bérulle-as founder of the French School which in all essentials formed Catholic spirituality in the period up to the Second Vatican Council, insisted that without making the priest a monk the more radical spiritual orientation characteristic of the monk could and should be lived out, mutatis mutandis, by the priest. The priest's ministry, above all his offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice, calls him to a christocentric and thus theocentric life founded on an abnegation of, or at least a certain indifference to, what would nowadays be termed "personal fulfilment." The Ecole Française, whose influence continued to radiate in England up to the end of the last century and beyond through such bishops writing on priesthood as John Cuthbert Hedley and Henry Edward Manning, gave a special place to the sacrifice of the altar, but its broader picture was founded christocentrically. Jesus, in becoming the New Adam (that is, a new father for human beings) through the dénouement or stripping of his humanity in its union with the all-exacting but also all-enhancing Word of God, had become the perfect Adorer of the father. For Bérulle, all prayer that warrants the name "mystical" is quite simply prayer that shares in Jesus' exemplary adoration, which in giving all received all-as the unity of Cross and Resurrection shows.6 The two key attitudes of the priest who is also called to be a father spiritually-in the ecclesial order which continues Christ's work in the economy-are, consequently, adoration and abasement. These generate, if faithfully maintained, closer adherence to Jesus as the Father's perfect adorer and an annihilation of self-interest which relates the priest in a special way to the virgin-mother of the Messianic community, Mary. Such "elevation to servitude" as Bérulle calls it, far from paralyzing creativity enhances the depth and efficacy of the priest's discipleship.7

Worth mentioning is the increasing antipathy of Bérulle and his school towards "abstract mysticism"-any doctrine of prayer or meditation which marginalizes the saving humanity of Christ. In their day, this meant an excessively philosophical spirituality. Today, as perusal of advertisements for spiritual workshops and the like in the Tablet and elsewhere would show, the same problem of an inadequately baptized, insufficiently Christocentric spirituality is still with us. The motivation of the priest's apostolate for Bérulle is never some vague general spirituality but the desire that as many people as possible should offer through their lives the sacrifice of praise to the Father which the Eucharist of the Son alone brings to its climax.

In my last vignette, John Vianney, I consider the pastoral mission of the (modern) priest, that fourth mark of the priesthood in history on my version of things. After the priest as man of the mysteries, the priest and the mind, and the priest and mysticism, we come to the priest as missionary. Of course in England there was no need to wait till the modern period (defined as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) for the pastoral office of the priest to be seen as missionary. Ever since the Elizabethan legislation had forbad priests access to our shores, they had been "missioners." The infant American Church too was always concerned with mission rather than maintenance-for the excellent reason that it had as yet nothing to maintain! But now with the shaking of the religious order of Western Europe to its foundations in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals, and the export of secular and nationalist ideologies to the Near and Middle East as well as to Latin America, Christendom and its outposts were passing away. Such exceptions as Ireland and Poland where the Church used (or was used by) proponents of corporate emancipation were less sure guides to the future. Of all countries France, the birthplace (as we have just noted) of the classical priestly spirituality of modern times, was to be the most systematically dechristianized-by the legislation of the Year Three when, as a boy in the countryside around Lyons could observe, even the "constitutional" clergyman who called the faithful citoyens and preached not so much the Gospel as the rights of man was sent packing and the parish church boarded up.

It was by a profound intuition that the Church settled on this boy as the canonized image of the pastoral priest. Vianney acted instinctively on what his tragic contemporary the Abbé Lamennais saw in theory-namely, that a Christian society could be re-created neither by the means of Catholic liberals-a compact with a secular State whereby religion would be relegated to the private sphere, nor by those of throne-and-altar conservatives-for the attraction to the State of establishmentarianism was in part the greater possibility of controlling the Church under that system. Salvation could come only through a re-conversion of the people of a most fundamental kind.8 It was for this that St. Jean-Marie's daily Mass, his oraison, his countless austerities-and perhaps, given the difficulty we seem to find with it nowadays we should include among them his untiring visitation of parishioners-were offered and offered efficaciously. Here, as in a microcosm, in one village, we see what more spectacular missionaries attempted in Africa, Indochina, Melanesia in the same period, and see it in a form which brings home to us that some version of it is the task of every priest.

For that mission two things are needed-first, that we should know what it is, and here only a well-instructed faith can tell us, and secondly, courage in carrying it out. In his Portrait of a Parish Priest, Lancelot Sheppard wrote of Vianney: "He took back nothing that he had given."9 Few of us can say the same of ourselves but our faults can be redeemed by a new generosity as the causal efficacy of the Resurrection draws the threads we would rather forget into a pattern where even defeats can contribute to victory.

What holds together the history I have consolidated into four figures is, so Catholics would say, a development of the doctrine and practice of the priesthood, exploring latencies in the act whereby Jesus Christ created the apostolic ministry. But what has also held it together since the beginning, ever since the Last Supper and its High Priestly Discourse, has been the Eucharistic sacrifice. Not for nothing do liturgiologists call the Canon or Anaphora of the Eucharistic Liturgy prex sacerdotalis, "the priestly prayer." I devote my coda, then, to a plea for the revivification of the idea of bishop and presbyter as sacrificing priests, with the deacon assisting at their sacrifice, as Lawrence when the Roman police found pope Sixtus.

The priesthood is a mystery living by the mysteries, the Eucharist, and so is doubly mysteric. A theological mystery, we remember, is a truth of revelation which, once communicated, appears all the more hidden because the truth involved cannot be superficially exhibited, since it has depths that a lifetime can plumb without striking ocean floor. I have described the priest in history as commissioned for a triple office, but I have also identified the central feature of that office, in historical perspective, as sacerdotal, liturgical, Eucharistic. The proclamation of the Word is ordered to the worship we shall be celebrating for ever in heaven without ever exhausting all there is to see in God's glory, while pastoral care is concerned with what is fitting for the lives of those who worship by the cultus of the New Covenant.

It follows that the way we celebrate the Liturgy is a litmus test. As sub-mediators of the only Mediator of the New Covenant, we are to make the universal priesthood of the faithful transparent to Christ the High Priest and him to them, so that we may all offer ourselves through him to the Father. This is most clear when the Eucharist is seen to be a sacrifice offered by the ministerial priest as the enacted image of Jesus Christ, a sacrifice whose aim is the glory of the Father by its sacramental expression of the Cross of the Son.

I venture to say that much modern Catholic liturgical practice largely fails to give this impression. Often the priest comports himself, if not as the host of a television chat show, then as what one commentator has called "the animator of a super-sized support group healing itself in its own warmth."10 The present Holy Father speaks much of union with the Eastern Orthodox, but many Orthodox would have difficulty in recognizing as the Church's worship what sometimes goes by the name in the West. It falls in their eyes so far short of what to ekklêsiastikon phronêma, the sensus Ecclesiae, requires of worship as hardly to count as liturgy at all.

Nearly forty years ago, in The Splendour of the Church, Henri de Lubac warned that a Catholic version of immanentism where God in Christ is in practice somehow changed or absorbed into the community was in danger of wrecking the theological, ecclesiological, liturgical renewal. Too horizontal, humanistic or matey a liturgy may be introduced for admirable reasons as an expression of New Testament philadelphia, but it may also soon come to be experienced otherwise. De Lubac wrote of his nightmare that Auguste Comte's sociological prediction for the Church's future would come true-a growing homogeneity between worshippers and the beings that are worshipped, the Church becoming perceived as a sacrament of humanity, itself the one and only true "Supreme Being," the dogma of the Incarnation ripening into fruition in an ecclesiology which will in turn liquidate all theology by showing that religion was about us all along.11

The liturgical malaise which today gives more than a little Aktualität to de Lubac's words has many aspects-musical, linguistic, architectural, iconographic, but let me mention one change which could be realized very simply albeit after careful preparation of the people. And that is the retention of the Westward or versus populum position for celebration of the Liturgy of the Word, but the recovery of the Eastward or versus apsidem position for the Liturgy of the Sacrifice. At one stroke, this would eliminate all those Masses which consist in one's being addressed throughout as at a public meeting, would help restore the theocentric orientation of the Mass, prevent the further growth of the humanistic immanentism feared by de Lubac and indicate the necessary apartness of the priest if he is to fulfil his specific rôle precisely for the people.

The Liturgy of the Word is ad populum, that of the Sacrifice is ad Deum.12 Here history and common sense concur.13 The balance of the theological idea of priesthood demands this-as perhaps does the psychological balance of priests themselves. Priests are there for the people, but they are not there to be devoured by them, and their vocation can be a happy one only if God himself is its evident primary point and goal. n

1 G. Neville, St. John Chrysostom. Six Books on the Priesthood (Crestwood, New York, 1984) is the most recent translation.

2 I follow here Jean-Pierre Mondet's 'Sacerdoce du Christ et sacerdoce ecclésial. Le témoignage de S. Jean Chrysostome,' in A. Houssiau-J. P. Mondet, Le sacerdoce du Christ et de ses serviteurs selon les Pères de l'Eglise (Louvain-la-Neuve 1990), pp. 97-103.

3 On the Priesthood IV. 5. That this thought is not idiosyncratic or even exclusively Eastern appears from a similar text of Gregory the Great, "At the hour of sacrifice, in response to the priest's acclamations, the heavens open up, the choirs of angels are witnessing the mystery, what is above and what is below unite, heaven and earth are united, matters visible and invisible become united," Dialogues IV. 60.

4 S. Tugwell, O.P., "Aquinas: Introduction," in idem., ed., Albert and Thomas. Selected Writings (New York 1988), pp. 265-267.

5 Ecclesiasticus 32:15-16; cf. Thomas's Prologue to his commentary on Boethius, De hebdomadibus.

6 F. Guillén Preckler, "Etat" chez le Cardinal de Bérulle. Théologie et spiritualité des "états" bérulliens (Rome 1974).

7 My account is indebted to W. M. Thompson, "An Introduction to the French School" in idem. (ed.), Bérulle and the French School. Selected Writings (New York 1989), pp. 3-101.

8 N. A. Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589-1989 (London and New York 1990), pp. 66-79.

9 L. C. Sheppard, Portrait of a Parish Priest. St John Vianney, the Curé d'Ars (London 1958), pp. 171-172. The judgment is the more valuable because of the biographer's sharp awareness of the quirkiness of his subject.

10 T. Day, Where Have You Gone Michelangelo? The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture (New York 1993), p. 169.

11 H. de Lubac, S.J., The Splendour of the Church (Et London 1956), pp. 164-166.

12 Naturally, the fruits of the Sacrifice are bestowed on the people: but this is true on all versions of the siting of the celebrant.

13 The historical exceptions have, since the promulgation of the Missale Paulinum, taken on, in the eyes of those not au fait with the most recent scholarship, the status of a rule! See by contrast, for example, M. J. Moreton, "Eis anatolas blepsate. Orientation as a Liturgical Principle" in E. A. Livingstone (ed.), Studia Patristica XVIII (Oxford and New York 1982), pp. 575-590. These points are developed in my Looking at the Liturgy. A Critical View of its Contemporary Reform (San Francisco 1996).